Project Background

Previous research carried out for the Highways Agency by TRL Limited has shown that the effectiveness of high-visibility clothing worn by road workers is critically dependent on the environment in which the road worker is operating. Maintaining good contrast between the road worker and the background is vital, yet road workers are frequently required to undertake their duties at night in the vicinity of vehicles displaying high-intensity flashing beacons. There are a number of conflicting requirements that need to be considered when developing a strategy for road worker conspicuity. These need to be considered and a holistic approach taken to night-time and daytime conspicuity to ensure that the road user...

Project Background

One of the highest risk activities for traffic management operatives is identified as exposure to live traffic whilst erecting and taking down temporary traffic management (TTM) signs. It has long been the view from industry that if the number of signs could be reduced this would immediately reduce the number of carriageway crossings and therefore risk exposure of operatives, but the Agency needs to balance risk to both the road worker and the travelling public when considering any change in current policy or practices. Previous work has identified that there is scope to reduce the number of signs and simplify temporary traffic management. More recently a task carried out for the Agency to assess the...

Project Objectives

Project Summary

Project Background

The Highways Agency recently launched a new strategic vision which set out the following the goals; • Provide a service that our customers can trust • Set the standard for delivery • Deliver sustainable solutions • Have the safest roads in the world • Ensure the network is a dynamic and resilient asset We are aiming to achieve these objectives in the context of a future where there are fewer accident hotspots, more challenging performance targets and less funding; it therefore needs to develop the tools to identify and understand road safety risk in new, more sophisticated ways. As part of this response we have appointed Risk Solutions to explore the idea of developing an holistic safety risk...

Project Background

Currently network resilience planning is focussed on incident management. These incidents are high frequency, short term, low consequence events that shut the network for periods of hours. The fact that they are frequent draws focus to these type of events and their impact on Journey Time Reliability. To date there have been very few incidents of asset failure that have significantly disrupted the operation of the network. However, a recent failure of a bridge deck in Canada has highlighted both the safety and potential disruption implications of such low frequency, long term, high consequence events - network closed for months. Similar failures occurred on the London Underground network in 1994 where a...

Project Background

This project will review progress in reducing the number and severity of accidents involving vehicles using motorway hard shoulders. This project will also take forward ideas recommended from earlier research.

Project Objectives

To update analysis of hard shoulder accidents on the motorway network. To provide maps of hard shoulder accidents on the network over the past five years. To take forward proposals for research and development on hard shoulder rumble strips. To take forward proposals for research and development on hard shoulder edge markings. To take forward proposals for research and development on refuges. To scope the possible benefits of...

Project Background

Project Objectives

Project Summary

Project Background

It is the responsibility of the Highways Agency to ensure that structures on the Trunk Road and Motorway network in England are maintained in a safe and serviceable condition, and that the maintenance budget Is spent cost effectively, on the highest priority needs. It is also an objective that highway structures are constructed and maintained using materials and techniques to ensure that they maximise durability, minimise maintenance and are sustainable. The Highways Agency also has higher level objectives such as 'Journey time reliability', 'Managing down costs', 'Speeding up delivery', as well as ensuring there is a safe and serviceable network, being a responsible owner, and managing traffic and...

Project Background

The European CVIS project started in February 2006 and is aiming to define and develop the information and infrastructure requirements for future Cooperative vehicle highway systems (CVHS). The CVIS consortium consists of over 60 partners from industry, public, government and academia across Europe. The project is scheduled to last four years with the culmination of trials to demonstrate information delivery from infrastructure to in-vehicle systems supporting automated vehicle control. Engagement in this project gives the HA visibility of the development of this significant European trial to help it understand future needs in its information gathering and dissemination systems and the future requirements...

Project Background

The Highways Agency is planning the delivery of a Managed Motorways (MM) programme which shall implement the successes and lessons learned from the M42 ATM scheme across 800 miles of the motorway network. The majority of the programme involves the dynamic use of the hard shoulder as a running lane. This requires efficient and effective monitoring and management before, during and after opening of the hard shoulder. The solution currently used on the M42 ATM scheme demands high levels of resource and a high dependency on the RCC operators which will be unsustainable on the projected scale of the future MM programme.

The requirement is to provide a support tool that ultimately would allow...